Windows 10: M2 won't boot if old SSD drive removed!

I upgraded my motherboard from Intel to a Ryzen and decided to do a cleanup of my drives as well. I still had my old SSD 120G which I no longer use so I formatted it then removed it as I wanted to upgrade the MD later that week!
Next morning tried to boot and nothing not even the BIOS flash screen! At first thought it was my video card as it was acting up the week before! So since I didn't have a spare video card I figured I'd upgrade the MB in case it was the MB.Still no BIOS screen. I unplugged every unused cable and got the BIOS screen so I knew it wasn't the video card at least! But I couldn't get it to boot off the M2 drive which was still in the socket! I had a win10 USB key and tried to boot to the repair section which I could couldn't fix it. I used the utility to get to the command prompt and could see the M2 dir contents fine. I was going to reinstall windows but it wouldn't let me. Finally I plugged in my old SSD and it booted right up in my Windows! I reconnected ALL my drives while it was running and they all were picked up by explorer. I re-booted and thought all was good, but when I removed the old SSD it went back to no boot or BIOS flash screen!

So how can I remove the old SSD and still boot normal?

I tried almost every combination of bios option , reset key , etc and still can't get it to work! Even the option in Win10 install to update UEFI on mb option!

Pete

P.S. MB is GIGABYTE B450 AORUS PRO WiFi

:)

 

Migration from Hdd to m2.SSD

Recently I have purchased a new laptop (hp probook 450 G4) and a new original windows 10 home edition and now I want to upgrade my 1 TB Hdd to a new m2 ssd and my laptop supports another slot for the m2 ssd so I can run both
the m2 ssd & hdd at the same time but I will make the m2 ssd the boot drive and the hdd will be the data drive.
MY Question is how can I migrate system drive to the new m2 ssd without the need to reinstall windows or any other installed programs and there is another thing, when I checked the disk management I found 3 recovery partitions will I have to
migrate them too or I have to migrate the system drive only

 

2 ssd migration to larger m2 ssd

Hi The

If you can connect both M2's to your system then you can clone the old Ms onto the new one - most systems do not have a second M2 port - you should check to see if that is possible . . .

If you can connect both drives to your system then the free version of Macrium Reflect would be a good choice to perform the cloning . ..

If you cannot connect both drives, then you will be unable to clone the old drive and your only choice will be to backup your data and clean install Windows 10 onto the new M2 SSD

 

Unable to boot into cloned drive after formatting old drive

I have an HP Omen laptop with a standard SATA hard drive and a recently purchased M.2 PCIe SSD.

I cloned the SATA drive onto the M2, but had trouble cloning all partitions. I have the System partition, Reserved and the Primary.

After cloning, I attempted to boot into the new hard drive. I had some problems setting the BIOS to automatically boot into my new hard drive. It would load the old one or give me "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key" if I manually went directly to it.

I finally was able to get it to work, by going into change the boot order and then:

1. Boot From EFIFile
   
2. Chose my PCIe HD
   
3. EFI
   
4. Boot
   
5. BootX64.efi
   

This worked without problem and booted into my M2 (fast!). I wasn't happy that it didnt boot directly to it though, so based on a comment that I read, I cleaned my old hard drive, removing everything from it. So now my new drive is the only one with anything. (I know this was stupid...)

After doing that, I not longer can use the steps above to get into the M2 SSD. The computer takes me straight to recovery, but I don't have a recovery partition anymore.

I made a Win 10 install USB and am about ready to do a full re-install of WIndows 10, but I was hoping someone may have some options to save my cloned drive. Since I have the Bootable USB, I now have access to a CMD prompt. Is there anything I can do to tell the system that it should boot to that hard drive?

Please note, my computer was using UEFI, but I have since tried setting the BIOS to legacy. I have tried both ways. My new M2 SSD was formatted as GPT. I don't know much about this and assume this may be related to my problem.